Asked What Has Changed
By Ed Roberson
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About this ebook
Finalist for Griffin International Poetry Prize, given by The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, 2022
Award-winning poet Ed Roberson confronts the realities of an era in which the fate of humanity and the very survival of our planet are uncertain. Departing from the traditional nature poem, Roberson's work reclaims a much older tradition, drawing into poetry's orbit what the physical and human sciences reveal about the state of a changing world. These poems test how far the lyric can go as an answer to our crisis, even calling into question poetic form itself. Reflections on the natural world and moments of personal interiority are interwoven with images of urbanscapes, environmental crises, and political instabilities. These poems speak life and truth to modernity in all its complexity. Throughout, Roberson takes up the ancient spiritual concern—the ephemerality of life—and gives us a new language to process the feeling of living in a century on the brink.
Morello's Venice
startled to hear the doctor say
this would be the last time he would see it,
a person used to keeping things alive
talking terminus — even more
startled when he returned
to hear him say it wasn't there
there were terrible rains
bookings cancelled.
when late he arrived,
everything was gone.
his wife had a cold.
they bundled together in blankets.
he refilled my prescription to
restore my soul.
Ed Roberson
Ed Roberson (Chicago, IL) is author of eleven books of poetry. His most recent being, Asked What Has Changed and, Closet Pronunciation. He is a recipient of the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award and the Lila Wallace Writers' Award. His collection, Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In was a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; his book, Atmosphere Condition was a winner of the National Poetry Series award and was nominated for the Academy Poets' Lenore Marshall Award. Retired from Rutgers University, Ed Roberson currently lives in Chicago where he taught classes and workshops as a visiting professor at Columbia College Chicago, 2004-7
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Book preview
Asked What Has Changed - Ed Roberson
a drop of water
*
From the window the surface of the puddles
says it’s raining you can’t see it falling
in the street lights or the darkened windshield
wipers’ smoothing it away
The silver of wetness has been steady
for days crows’ feathers
have been the light composition
of the streets un-phased they eat
and don’t fly away at the light
exposing their dark plate until the last
minute not to become timeless themselves
they are the droplets of lightning that return upward
screaming at the disturbance
jumping up and down on the surface of everything
that matters troubling
the structure of even the structure-less
water water so it is water
not rain
though it only changes its name
even though it clearly says trouble
I don’t know what it is
I’m seeing
(I’m seeing …)
my liquid body water in a flesh glass
on the dining car table as the train crosses
a track change the surface of the water
appears as ripples untouched by any stone
oscillating in place or as
when my friend quietly says that
is an aftershock or what I’ve heard
music sets up
off the walls of our body
structures that hang
in our blood and show that
standing at a bus stop
when not the one I want rumbles through
the potholes I can feel
my body floating up and down
and know there is nothing under my feet
but another street I can’t see
the engineering
translates the suspension
to me what reception is triggered
by this signal I don’t know what I am yet
making of what is called troubling
(what is called troubling …)
the water.
what has changed from glancing out at the weather
to the unrevealed information held in
the pointillist flux of water